I used to have a cat that understood that our birds weren't for eating. While we never tempted fate there were two encounters:

1) She spent about 7 hours locked in a big bird cage. The birds were rather upset with her as she was blocking their food and water dishes. (She knew how she had gotten into the cage, there was nothing else she would recognize as a door, she was waiting by the only door she understood. The dishes were placed by that door for ease of access.) When I came home I found a very unhappy cat being harassed by several pigeons that couldn't fly. None of them were hurt.

2) One got loose while being handled. This was an unusually stupid one, it attempted to land on her head. She very rapidly was elsewhere.

Birds are never cute, they're tiny dinosaurs just waiting for their evolutionary chance to take over the world again. The cat's cute, but cats cuddling with any mammal is cuter than cats cuddling with birds.

L.D. Ablo:My cats will lay waste to anything and everything that is smaller than them.

Quite useful for the waterbugs that come up out of the drain. They kill and eat them.

I'm just glad I'm bigger than them.

If you have water bugs coming out of your drain then you have a problem. Seriously, call a plumber. There's probably a broken line somewhere. If a drain is working properly, there is no way those evil hell dwellers should be hanging out in there coming and going as they please.

My mom rescued a baby robin when I was a teenager. The cats were utterly perplexed as to why she would bring in a perfectly good snack and taunt them with it by putting it in a cage that they couldn't get their little paws inside.

Our cat would have let that baby bird sleep on its back- until she decided it was snack time. That cat could catch birds out of the air. She would wait for them to swoop down real close and then do a backflip and catch them in mid-air while upside down. And then it got real ugly. Once they were properly crippled, she'd play with them a while. Eventually, they would become cat food. Except the ones she left by the kitchen door.

Her crowning achievement was a full-grown Canada goose that waddled into the yard. It was an epic battle. Honestly, I thought the cat was toast. The goose was mean, and probably double her weight. But she got hold of its neck and just held on for the ride. And try to take her away from her kill? Hell no! She tucked in like it was Christmas dinner and didn't leave its side for an entire day.

Tuxedo cats. Do NOT fark with them. They are the bad-ass branch of the cat family, and do not take any crap from punk solid color cats or pansy calico felines.